Forks in the Road

I haven't made a lot of progress lately, but ideas continue to swirl around in my brain. I've also just watched the first season of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which is just the amount of weird I need in my life right now. So I think it's helping.

A bit of advice. If ever you're stuck on a creative project, do some mindless, menial task. Your mind wanders, and you start getting ideas. Science says so. So these days, most of my ideas show up while I'm mopping floors. Which I do a lot. So things are going fairly well on the creative front. It's a good job to have during NaNo, it seems.

So what I was thinking about, while my shambling husk was cleaning something, was concerning the different worlds that our three heroes might encounter. Now, I already have this concept of diverging timelines. There's the little one that Tony creates by dying but also not dying. From what we'll see of it, there aren't a lot of differences from the prime timeline, since it only broke off a day or so ago.

But what if at least some of the other worlds they visit are also divergent timelines. But they broke off much further back, and so have become quite different. Maybe one's a dystopian wasteland. Or we're all speaking Russian (which would be a great opportunity to practice my vocab). Or the US is divided into quite a different set of states:

Source

Or! And this is a random idea I had written down, and this is certainly the time to use them. Planet of the apes. Sort of. See, I read somewhere ( I no longer remember where) about how Old World monkeys evolved and branched into apes and then humanity because they adapted to living on the ground. That's why they lost their tails. But New World monkeys never did that. So what if, at some point in the distant past, some Central American monkeys found themselves with too many plains and too few jungles, and a whole separate strain of man-like creatures evolved in the New World. What would that world be like, a few million years later?

At this point, I don't know if there will be any worlds that can't be explained by a timeline that broke off at some point in the past. I don't want to commit to that idea entirely, as the only explanation, because I still want the possibility of literally anything happening. If, once it's done, it turns out that that will explain everything, I'll just pretend that was my plan all along.

That's the NaNo way.

And I'll see you Friday.